While some may have balked at Sony taking an
early exit from the PDP market, LG is becoming the fourth major player to reevaluate its investment in plasma after
Philips was caught claiming that LCD TVs would likely shape its strategy and Hitachi began to look intently
overseas for buyers. Reportedly, LG is closing the doors of its oldest
plasma manufacturing plant in Gumi, South Korea as it hopes to "increase operational efficiency and reduce costs." The removal of the A1 plant will drop its plasma capacity from 430,000 to 360,000 panels this year, and it should save the company somewhere between "$22 million and $32 million per year." Notably, LG currently sits in second place in quantity of PDPs shipped worldwide, but considering the perpetual
nosedive of HDTV
prices over the past year or so, we can't say that
Life looks too Good in the PDP arena right now.
[Via
PCMag]
posted May 21st 2007 10:17AM
Not really earth shattering. LCD's are superior in many ways and cheaper. I certainly won't be sad to see plasma go.
I second that. Plasmas were suppose to be all of the rage. We got one in our office for a pretty penny and I thought I would have to "settle" with my LCD set. Turns out I was wrong. Pretty darn good bang for the buck. I'm sure OLED or whatever is big in 2 years will beat it, though.
I agree with Kev.
Plasma tvs are superior in many ways to LCDs when it comes to cinema reproduction. Not only can plasma tv's display a more truer "black", but they also are much more accurate in reproducing fast-motion sequences.
Its not about LCD's being better, its about them being cheaper for the company to produce, maintain, and recycle. Its all about the benjamins baby..
Nah, plasmas are not better. I don't know, it should be pretty obvious for anyone with two eyes who lives within driving distance to a mall. Take a look.
Older LCDs had a lot of problems: Washed out colors, digital artifacts etc. But newer ones have none of that. I just picked up a 32" Samsung with 7000:1 contrast and if anything it looked better than the plasmas they had in the store. Same contrast, same brightness, same vivid colors, 178 deg viewing angle (note: 180 is the max.) and much higher resolution.
At the rate LCDs are improving its clear that they will be better than plasmas in all areas next year or the year after so no wonder everyone's getting out of the plasma business. And it's too expensive to make 1080p plasmas so as soon as HD DVD/bluray/HDTV becomes wide-spread plasmas will be completely uninteresting.
Currently plasma has better color, viewing angle, contrast, black level, and response time. This has been quantified with side by side color corrected displays. Don't look at un adjusted TVs on a show floor and think that has anything to do with the quality of the display. At some point in the future LCD's might be better and at that time I'll buy one. But right now plasma is the best so that is what I watch now.